al by all
constitutional methods within his power. It was equally his duty to
refrain from all violent interference with the functionaries charged with
its execution, and to avoid, if possible, all collision with the
government. But if, without his seeking, a fugitive slave had been cast
upon his humane offices, the question then would have arisen whether he
should obey God or man; and to this question he could have had but one
answer. Yet his obedience to God would have lacked its crowning grace, if
he had not meekly yielded to the penalty for his disobedience to the law
of the land. It was by this course that the primitive Christians attested
their loyalty at once to God and to "the powers that be," which were
"ordained of God." They refused obedience to the civil authorities in
matters in which their religious duty was compromised; but they neither
resisted nor evaded the penalty for their disobedience. Similar was the
course of the Quakers in England and America almost down to our own time.
They were quiet and useful citizens, performing the same functions with
their fellow-citizens, so far as their consciences permitted, and, where
conscience interposed its veto, taking patiently the distraining of their
goods, and the imprisonment of their bodies, until, by their blameless
lives and their meek endurance, they won from the governments both of the
mother country and of the United States, amnesty for their conscientious
scruples.

There may be a state of society in which it becomes *the duty of good
citizens to assume an illegal attitude, and to perform illegal acts, in
the interest of law and order*. If those who are legally intrusted with
executive and judicial offices are openly, notoriously, and persistently
false to their trusts, to such a degree as to derange and subvert the
social order which it is their function to maintain, good citizens, if
they have the power, have undoubtedly the right to displace them, and to
institute a provisional government for the temporary emergency. A case of
this kind occurred a few years ago in San Francisco. The entire government
of the city had for a series of years been under the control of ruffians
and miscreants, and force and fraud had rendered the ballot-box an
ineffectual remedy. No law-abiding citizen deemed his life or property
safe; gross outrages were committed with impunity; and thieves and
murderers alone had the protection of the municipal authorities.
Despairing o